


Holiday makers

by Petra



Category: Ashes to Ashes, DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairing, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-02
Updated: 2011-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 10:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barbara Gordon has just been shot, and that bullet has taken her back to 1982.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holiday makers

**Author's Note:**

> For [](http://odditycollector.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**odditycollector**](http://odditycollector.dreamwidth.org/). It refused to be a drabble and became 10 drabbles instead.

"Thank you for your assistance," says the computer-warped voice on the telephone.

"It was nothing," Alex says automatically, though she hasn't had enough sleep in the last week what with juggling her normal caseload, dealing with the mysterious American's requests, and everything else.

"You cannot be compensated through the normal channels. Where would you like to, ah, holiday this year?"

Alex has been expecting some form of money. A surprise trip sounds extravagant and strange. "Let me call you back about that--it's my daughter's birthday today. I'll ask her where she'd like to go."

"We'll call you back."

*

The twenty-third time Alex thinks she's gone entirely mad, though by that time she's stopped counting, is when the red-haired girl in the shockingly tight blue-and-yellow costume leaps in between Alex and the boy with the gun.

"You'll be killed," Alex shouts. "Get down!"

The girl kicks the gun out of the boy's hand, looking as though she's been doing that sort of move all her life, and knocks him down, tying his hands efficiently.

"Thank you," Alex says, "but I'm a copper. I'll take it from here."

The girl grins--masked, bright teeth, bright lipstick--and scales the building easily.

*

Mask-Girl is back some weeks later, though only as a Polaroid taped to a suspect, next to an envelope of information that will turn him from a suspect into a convicted felon.

"We can't just accept this without a source," Alex protests.

"Got our source, don't we?" Gene flicks the Polaroid with his fingernail. In it, the girl is next to the suspect. "Ever seen her before?"

"Once," Alex says.

Gene sniffs. "Should've introduced me."

"She's too young for you, Guv."

"We could use another competent WPC around the place."

"Who wears leggings in public."

"Nothing wrong with that, Bolly."

*

Ms Barbara Gordon is in London as part of an international exchange program for university-aged children of police officers--Alex makes a note to see if it exists for Molls--and she's under the care of Chief Superintendent Mackintosh and his family. Why SuperMack decides Fenchurch East CID is a good place for an impressionable girl is beyond Alex; she resolves to shield Barbara from the worst bits. "How are you finding London?" she asks.

Barbara's smile is bright. "It's been a blast, DI Drake."

"Alex. Please."

"Alex." She grins. "I was told to be polite."

"Don't worry about that."

*

Barbara--"Call me Babs"--and Shaz hit it off like mad, which is the only reason Alex lets her anywhere near Luigi's after work. "Just keep out of Ray's reach and you'll be fine," Shaz tells Babs.

"As though he's the only Neanderthal here," Alex says, but quietly.

"I spent most of my childhood around cops. It's okay, I promise." Babs smiles at Luigi, who's taken with another signorina too far from home, and charms a string of free drinks out of him.

By the time the lads are betting each other foolish things, Babs is leaning against Alex, asleep.

*

Alex gets her upstairs--her couch is as good a place to sleep as any--and calls SuperMack. She'll send Babs home in the morning. "Hey," Babs says when Alex sits down beside her to take her shoes off. "I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I wanted to get you alone," Babs says, sitting up and looking improbably clear-eyed.

Alex shivers. No one with an interest in her in this decade has been pleasant. "Why?"

"Two things." Babs kisses her--tasting of wine and lipstick, of too-young American girls and madness.

They don't get to the other thing for hours.

*

This isn't how Alex spends her nights--kissing the cloying taste of cocktails out of a pretty girl's mouth, running her fingers along slick folds that aren't hers, teasing and stroking until someone she hardly knows clutches at her shoulders tightly enough to bruise and whispers, "Oh, don't stop."

It's morally superior to drinking enough that she can throw herself into bed with someone she half-knows and ignore the parts she does know.

Babs is eager, willing, and better at this than Alex expects herself to be, but she forgives the occasional fumble and tells Alex just what to do.

*

Babs brings up the harder bit, one hand on Alex's chest between her breasts as if to gauge her pulse. "Are you not from around here?"

"How do you mean?"

"From another time, for example." The way she says it, it nearly sounds normal.

Alex's heart pounds. "Yes. Why do you ask?"

"One or two things, here and there." Babs sighs, relieved. "When are you from?"

"2008." It sounds impossible aloud in this terminally 80's bedroom. "You?"

"1988."

"Not so far from home, then."

"Except I'm on the wrong continent." Babs kisses her cheek. "At least the people are nice."

*

Alex says, "I've just been shot in 2008," and it doesn't seem real.

Babs takes her hand and squeezes it hard enough to hurt. "Is that how people get here?" Her voice is so hoarse it's like she's using a vocoder.

"Some sort of traumatic shock, at least." Alex squeezes Babs' hand and doesn't ask, not outright. "I know--knew--someone who woke up here after he was hit by a car."

"Knew?" Babs sounds ill.

"He woke up again in 2006."

"Good." Babs takes a deep breath. "I was shot, too, but I'm not staying here."

"Nor am I."

*

Alex delivers Babs to SuperMack in the morning, cheerful, tousled, and surviving her hangover with the ease of the young. "DI Drake was an excellent hostess," she says. "It was great to see a real police officer's--copper's--ah, flat."

"It was my pleasure," Alex says.

She doesn't see Babs again, and doesn't think to ask after her when things go pear-shaped with SuperMack.

Mask-Girl seems to disappear from their reports, too, disappointing Chris and Ray, who never got to see her.

"We're better off without vigilantes," Gene says.

"They'd hardly get away with anything you wouldn't in any case."

[DVD Commentary](http://petra.dreamwidth.org/498625.html) of the above.


End file.
